I hear the bells

The goal of NaSweKniMo was to complete a 30 000 stitch sweater in under a month. While I didn't finish the Husband sweater by the 30th of November at midnight, I came pretty close. I still haven't finished it, but I have knit more than 30000 stitches. I didn't work out the exact math, but I'm up over 37000.

The progress you see here has since moved backwards a little. That intarsia cross in the center wasn't working for me; the scale was too small and due to a miscalculation, it was about 2 inches too high. I was also using a funky method for the colourwork that I wasn't particularly keen on. I would knit across the first row (stranding the green behind), drop the charcoal yarn and then continue with the green all the way around. When I got back to the charcoal, I slipped all the stitches across, turned the work and purled back, slipped them all across again and then joined a new strand of green. I knit the entire cross this way, weaving in the ends as I went to tighten up the edges where the stitches weren't joined every other row. It was working OK, but I wasn't thrilled about it. When I got to the point where I would start the saddle shoulders, I realized that I had 2 more rows of the cross to complete, with no rows left to knit on the body. There was only one thing left to do. Frog.

I ripped all the way back to two rows above the arm join. I checked with the Husband about duplicate stitching the cross in afterwards and after getting a nod of approval, I began re-knitting without the intarsia. The frogging was painful, but only because I hadn't listened to that niggly "this isn't working" voice in the first place. Why didn't I heed my own warning bells?

You knitting is just beautiful always but I really love this sweater. I am coveting knitted stuff right now, mostly cause I can't do it myself. Frogging eh? I can't imagine what that is but evidently I should be sorry for you.

I recently completed a sweater worked in the round a la EZ and my man had requested a letterman style P in the center of the chest. I first thought about working the intarsia the way you attempted and decided it wasn't going to work for me, so I used duplicate stitch also. It worked very well and looks really good. Good Luck and I'm sure your guy will love it!

Yeek, yes. I'm familiar with the voice going, "Hey lady, this is going to suck and you know it. Just stop now and start over so that you don't finish a big pile of crap that you'll hate." This happened with the recent intarsia stocking situation. I ripped that baby out three times before I was happy with it. No fun, but big pay off.